Saturday, April 24, 2010

Cameron's PM proposal

The idea is that a new PM, who comes into office for whatever reason, should call an election within six months of doing so. I can see why it appeals to him as it makes it much harder for him to be unseated if he does win an election. But it's a silly idea in a parliamentary democracy.

It's not that bad

KEN CLARKE UNLEASHED

Oh my god. The most overrated politician of the last 30 years (or whenever Tony Crosland died), about 15 years past his (weak) prime, just two months off his 70th birthday, has been let loose, merely because George Osborne (underrated I believe) is seen as (unfairly therefore) an electoral liability. This really is madness.

Lord Pearson

I think it's fair to say that I disagree with almost every policy of Lord Pearson's and the UKIP and think it ridiculous that a member of the House of Lords lectures on democracy. However I thought this interview was rather refreshing and Jon Sopel, if that's who it was, sounds like a madman.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Netting off votes

If I am going to vote for the party which came 1st in my seat last time, and my wife is going to vote for the party that came 2nd, and the party that came 3rd has no chance of winning, is there any reason why we should bother voting? Shouldn't we just net off our votes?

Ignoring the question of trust, I think it's probably a bit rude not to turn up and vote, especially given some people will have gone to the bother of manning the polling booth etc. Still if we don't get around to doing so I think we're going to have to make sure our views do cancel out so as to not regret it.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Why Lib Dems don't do as well as other parties

My post on election campaigns not mattering now seems rather quaint, with the Lib Dems surging in the polls. Of course this is not completely novel, the idea of a 3rd party 'surge' was enough ingrained in popular conciousness for Spitting Image to joke about David Steel 'feeling' it.

Anyway what is perhaps becoming more clear is that even if the Lib Dems have the same percent of votes as Labour and the Conservatives, they do much worse in terms of numbers of seats. Most of the calculators put a 30% each election as something like Labour on 300 seats, Tories on 200 seats and Lib Dems on 100 seats.

Itís not so much the disposition of the seats but the FPTP system itself, which simply favours geographically concentrated votes. So say the Tories take 60 percent in all southern seats, Libs 30 percent and Lab 10 percent, and the reverse is true in the north. Nationally if equal no. of seats in north and south then vote share is Con 35, Lab 35, Libs 30. But Libs have no seats.

I wasn't entirely sure if this was right, but I think it is essentially correct - the Lib Dems' support is too widely spread, and they do reasonably well in most seats, not especially well in enough. Here is a chart of each party's % share of the vote in the 2005 election, starting with each's seat where they got the highest share of the vote in % terms, and ending with their lowest. So the 1st point on the chart is not a particular seat, but for each party the share of the vote they receivedin the seat where they received their highest share of the vote.

The box shows the share of the vote - 40% and higher - that typically wins you a seat. Of the 614 seats won by one of the three main parties, only 45 were won with less than 40% of the vote. Similarly in only 32 seats did a party get more than 40% and NOT win.

So taking the 40% line, one can see the Lib Dims get about 60 seats, the Tories 200 and Labour 350 or so - about what happened.

Now let's assume the vote share - 35.3 Labour, 32.3 Tory and 22.1 Lib Dem in 2005 - becomes 29.9 Labour, 29.9 Tory and 29.9 Lib Dem - not wildly dissimilar to some recent polls.Now the first thing to note is that the % share of the vote when a candidate will typically win will fall, to something like 37%. This is simply because the Labour and Conservative share has fallen, and we are in a three-way tussle.

But again we can see a good estimate of how many seats each party will get from where their line crosses that 37% line - the Lib Dems about 150, the Conservatives about 210 and Labour about 280. Now this isn't quite what the uniform polls predict, that is because of a variety factors such as boundary changes since 2005, the particular makeup of some seats whereby Labour can win with a slightly smaller share than the Libs and so on. But it does show us why the Lib Dems fail to match Labour. And basically it's because their vote is spread reasonably evenly, with still high % shares of the vote in the last 200 constituencies, whereas the Tory and Labour vote has collapsed.

This assumes a uniform national swing (UNS), so the Lib Dems have gained 8% of the vote nationally since 2005 and will gain 8% in every constituency. What they need to form a government is for that extra 8% nationally to be concentrated in seats 200-400, where it would win them the election.

PR

As everyone knows, I'm a great supporter of PR, in particularly STV, and not a foul-weather friend like Gordon Brown (my election 2005 first thoughts were "55% of the seats on 36% of the vote though. Can we have PR?"). Thus I was quite surprised last night in Nick Clegg's interview to see that he didn't seem to be aware that a party could win most votes but not most seats. It was quite strange - he genuinely didn't seem to understand Paxman's point. I guess he might have been pretending not to understand, in order to ignore it, and I suppose it would hardly lose him votes.